May 22, 2014

A recurrent theme here at iSteve is that Americans should pay careful, respectful attention to how New Yorkers have rebuilt their city in recent decades because there is much that can be learned from New York. Of course, New Yorkers are tireless in offering advice to the rest of America, but the public verbiage seldom has much to do with what actually works in New York. For example ...

When I was looking for a job in New York City in 1982, I stayed on 14th Street between 4th and 5th Avenue. The rule of thumb back then about the Lower East Side was that 3rd Avenue was fine, and the west side of 2nd Avenue was okay, but you wouldn't want to cross 2nd Avenue (unless, I suppose, you were looking to buy drugs). Beyond was, presumably, 1st Avenue and a legendary set of north-south avenues beginning A, B, C known as Alphabet City, but nobody I was staying with was a drug addict so they'd never actually been there.

These days, of course, much is different, for which New York speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver can take some of the credit for blocking construction of public housing for Puerto Ricans on the Lower East Side for decades. But while doing so, always make sure to have lined up a hapless shlemiel to be your fall guy when the political winds shift.

To Sheldon Silver, the powerful speaker of the New York State Assembly, it was nothing but a simple case of mistaken identity.

In the 1970s, Mr. Silver, a Democrat, worked with a new nonprofit group, the United Jewish Council of the East Side, to block low-income housing on a large, barren site in his district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the beginning of a decades-long effort that was described in a recent article in The New York Times.

From that article describing the ancient alliance between Speaker Silver and William E. Rapfogel of the publicly-supported Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty:

The long-ago walk [in 1977] was the first public display of an alliance that became central to the lives and careers of both Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Silver. They worked together across the decades while climbing parallel ladders: Mr. Silver to Assembly speaker and Mr. Rapfogel to leadership of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a large, publicly financed charity.

But their long affiliation came to an abrupt end last year when Mr. Rapfogel, 59, was arrested and charged in a scheme that had allegedly looted more than $7 million in kickbacks from Met Council’s insurance broker over the years. He is due back in court in April.

The arrest cast new light on a relationship about which little was known beyond the obvious: Mr. Silver has funneled millions of public dollars to the organization that Mr. Rapfogel led, and he employs Mr. Rapfogel’s wife, Judy, as his chief of staff.

A primary focus of their alliance had been a struggle to preserve the Jewish identity of the neighborhood they delivered for Mr. Koch all those years ago.

Their battleground was some 20 barren acres along the southern side of Delancey Street, where, in 1967, the city leveled blocks of rundown apartment buildings. More than 1,800 low-income families, largely Puerto Rican, were sent packing and promised a chance to return to new apartments someday. Now, nearly 50 years later, the land is still a fallow stretch of weed- and rat-ridden parking lots, though in the waning days of the Bloomberg administration, the city announced that the land would finally be developed into a complex called Essex Crossing, to include retail markets, restaurants, office and cultural space. And new apartments. ...

The future Essex Crossing

But this glossy development on Avenues A and B on the street to the Williamsburg Bridge won't exactly be public housing.

But an extensive review of the archives of four mayors and more than two dozen interviews show Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel diligently working behind the scenes to promote specific plans and favored developers. Mr. Rapfogel made clear that the goal was to maintain the area’s Jewish identity, seemingly at the expense of other communities.

Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel steadfastly opposed any mention of affordable housing, which would have altered the demographics of the neighborhood and put Mr. Silver’s political base in question. And Mr. Silver appears to have occasionally misrepresented the desires of his Chinese and Hispanic constituents in conversations with city officials to quash housing plans for the site.

“They’re the reason that this site has been empty for 50 years,” said Edward Delgado, known as Tito, who was a teenager when the city cleared the blocks and his family was evicted. He has been advocating for affordable homes at the site in the decades since.

From today's follow-up article:

Those actions, Mr. Silver insisted after the article was published, were actually taken by another man: Sheldon E. Silver, a Minneapolis-born lawyer who moved to Brooklyn in the early 1970s and died in 2001.

“I was forever confused with this guy,” Mr. Silver said at a breakfast he hosted on Thursday at the state Democratic Party convention. “Even after he left there, I got phone calls from people who I knew.”

Mr. Silver’s spokesman, Michael Whyland, said in an email that the other Mr. Silver “was a counsel to U.J.C. in the ’70s and early ’80s.”

“You can understand why he would be upset,” Mr. Whyland said in a subsequent telephone call.

But the documents cited in the article make clear that Speaker Silver — a master at distancing himself from controversies and scandals in his chamber — was in fact the person who pressed New York City officials to allow an international mall to be built on the site, instead of low-income housing. The letter quoted was written on his official stationery from the Assembly. And minutes of the meetings with city officials clearly identify Mr. Silver as the lawmaker, not the similarly named lawyer from Brooklyn.

After Mr. Silver’s office saw those documents, it dropped its request for a correction on which Mr. Silver pressed for the mall in the 1970s.

38 comments:

Still seems kind of odd that they couldn't get this piece of land developed for so long. Couldn't they have included the required low income housing and filled it with poor Jews, say, from Kiryas Joel, an hour away?

"and favored developers. Mr. Rapfogel made clear that the goal was to maintain the area’s Jewish identity, seemingly at the expense of other communities."

The trick is to make sure that people say Jewish and not White. See, if I say that I am trying to preserve the neighborhood's Jewish identity, that's OK. If I say that I am trying to preserve its White identity, that sounds really sinister. Of course, since the overwhelming majority of American Jews are White, I'm also ensuring that the neighborhood stays White, so it's a two for one deal.

When Occupy Wall Street started making noise about moving on from their protests of Fox News and the Koch Brothers, and instead to turn their attention to Goldman Sachs, Sheldon Silver immediately went to the microphones and told the NYC authorities that it was time to start shutting down the Occupy movement.

That was the first time that I ever noticed the name "Sheldon Silver".

That was quite near Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village which were communities developed after WWII for middle class people, and served that function for decades. Imagine the current NYC administration promoting a housing project just for middle class people, unthinkable now I would say.

Failed Messiah has a whole bunch more. This scandal has been going on for a year now. juicy stuff.

Google "site:failedmessiah.typepad.com rapfogel".

The Jewish community has been gathering money for Rapfogel to help him make restitution for the federal/state poverty money he stole.

That is the definition of chutzpah.

The guy swiped $7M federal and state money that should have gone to poor Jews, yet he and his backers ask that Jews ante up $3.1M so he can make restitution (while keeping all the stuff he bought with the stolen cash!) so the goyim don't send him to jail.

As best I can figure out the Jewish logic is "he really stole from the government, not us Jews, so let's not be too hard on the guy. Other than being a huge thief he really is a pretty good Jew."

“I was forever confused with this guy,” Mr. Silver said at a breakfast he hosted on Thursday at the state Democratic Party convention. “Even after he left there, I got phone calls from people who I knew.”

When I see a name like United Jewish Council, I feel the need to replace Jewish with Christian, Mormom, etc., and then wonder, does such an organization exist?

Could such an organization exist, or would it be hounded out of existence with accusations of racism and other isms?

Anyone else have similar thoughts?

Organizations like this exist, but are completely ineffective. Usually they'll get a commemorative plaque from a mayor or march in a parade, and then they go home to regular lives being honest citizens.

The people in these organizations either don't care about power or are too incompetent in the games that need to be played to acquire, maintain, and apply power.

First, you get to see drawings of the project, which is a typical ghastly piece of modern design that looks like a shopping mall in Hong Kong or something. Just ugly, unimaginative. The parking lots arguably are less of an eye sore.

There's also a fascinating talking head, one Gigi Li, a young Chinese woman talking about the project. Close your eyes and she has that typical white girl SWPL voice that you hear everywhere in hipster New York. You'd think she was a Jewish girl from NYU. One thing about Asians: the younger ones SWPL-ify like crazy (meanwhile, the old ones stumble around in a daze on public transportation).

The other guys in the video are a cross section of Jewish machers. And the whole thing is just a lot of romanticizing the tenement era, which in reality was brutal, cruel, vicious, degrading and horrifying.

About 400,000 players left the sport last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. While almost 260,000 women took up golf, some 650,000 men quit.

According to the National Golf Foundation, with 200,000 players under 35 abandoning the game last year.

There also are fewer places to play golf these days. Only 14 new courses were built in the U.S. last year, while almost 160 shut down, the National Golf Foundation said. Last year marked the eighth straight year that more courses closed than opened.

The people sticking with the sport are playing fewer rounds than before, often opting for nine holes rather than 18. In total, U.S. golfers played 462 million rounds last year, according to Golf Datatech. That was the fewest number since 1995.

They'll never mention the decline of WASPs/Whites and the decline of golf.

Also, has anyone here noticed that when non-whites and non-blacks, such as southeast asians or middle easterners play golf, they don't play golf for the game or enjoyment but, to status climb or attempt to assimilate into upper class society?

At the driving ranges and courses I go to, the few asians / middle easterners don't really care to play. They are more concerned with posting up in the clubhouse while wearing expensive clothing and a playing glove indoors.

"They worked together across the decades while climbing parallel ladders: Mr. Silver to Assembly speaker and Mr. Rapfogel to leadership of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a large, publicly financed charity."

As dearieme said, a "publicly financed charity" is not really a charity. It is an organization for extracting public money (i.e. the coerced tax payments of citizens) and putting it into private hands. In other words, it is a racket.

A "charity" dedicated to eliminating jewish poverty? How much jewish poverty is there in America? Well, Mr. Rapfogel did seem to have been pretty successful at eliminating his own poverty.

Steve, OT; in the following is a Rory Sutherland analogy you might find useful.

http://edge.org/conversation/this-thing-for-which-we-have-no-name

"If you look at the world of physical design—I drove here today and I steered the car with my hands; every single car I know, including Formula 1 cars has a steering wheel. Now, our hands didn't evolve to steer cars. What we do very sensibly is we design cars in such a way as some evolved equipment that we have is quite good at steering, which is why nobody's attempting to devise an interface where you steer your car with your nose.

"In the physical world we're very good at designing things that work well with our evolved physique. If you take the psychological world, we're much, much worse. We are, in many cases, doing the equivalent of designing a car you have to try and steer with your nose. Because our understanding and our appreciation of evolved psychology is much worse."

And:

"What fascinates me is that when we design physical things, no one's so dumb as to design a car that you steer with your little toe. When we design programs and government policies and things, we commit that error all the time."

A curiosity is how blacks now mean Chicago. Also amusing is how they use the word transplant. The experts at Wikipedia say that Dubuque has about 5% black, but apparently they are not poor enough to qualify for Section 8. So Dubuque is discriminating against blacks by not impoverishing them enough to qualify for a government program, so Dubuque must transplant impoverished blacks. I suggest Dubuque work fast and round up Bajans. Of if that fails blacks from as far away from Dubuque as possible. Wilkes Barre Pa has constant problems with the relations of Section 8 transplants from newly fashionable Brooklyn and Philly. My guess is if Wilkes Barre Pa got Section 8 transplants from LA they would not have the cousins showing up to escape police investigations of yesterday's shootings.

"and favored developers. Mr. Rapfogel made clear that the goal was to maintain the area’s Jewish identity, seemingly at the expense of other communities."

The trick is to make sure that people say Jewish and not White. See, if I say that I am trying to preserve the neighborhood's Jewish identity, that's OK. If I say that I am trying to preserve its White identity, that sounds really sinister. Of course, since the overwhelming majority of American Jews are White, I'm also ensuring that the neighborhood stays White, so it's a two for one deal.

Nah, Jews are only white when they decide they want to be, and only for those purposes. They're not when they don't want to be.

Ergo, Jews aren't really white.

Also, I mean "European Caucasoid" or "Europid" when I say "white." Since the "white" Jews are only half European, generally speaking, "Jews are white" is an untruth.

"There is a huge swath of section 8 devastation across the rural northeast, stretching from western Mass. to central Penn. "

As an observer of Section 8:

1) Project based Section 8 is the killer as it essentially creates private run housing projects in small towns. "tenant-based" section 8 is less destructive to the town, but more difficult for the property owner. If you live in a small town figure out a way to bribe small property owners into accepting "tenant-based" vouchers.

2) Wilkes Barre Pa was screwed because the project based Section 8 was actually developed by a Brooklyn based developer who sent Brooklyn urban poor 3 hours away to Wilkes Barre. Think about how hard it is to meet the low income requirements for someone working in New York City. Anyways ... if Wilkes Barre made the effort to get Section 8 tenants from say California or even Chicago, there would be a barrier to the friends and family showing up unexpected like after a shooting. That barrier is a car that can do more than 500 miles in one shot. The Bus would be a nightmare as you would probably have to travel from Chicago to NY City and catch another bus to Wilkes Barre. The bus these days may involve random screenings for guns and booze.

So I really think Dubuque would do well for itself to invest in some Section 8 cherry picking.

I lived in NYC in 1987. You needn't have avoided Alphabet City. I even ate Thankgiving dinner there at a hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant, followed by a lot of drinking and billiards in the Ukrainian Men's Club. I never saw a pusher in this area. The pushers were in Washington Square, and they operated in daylight.

Maybe things changed from '82 to '87. Everyone did tell me the city had "cleaned up" Washington Park, and much of the rest of the town as well - even then. Of course, Wash. Square was partly an outdoor flop house for homeless drunks sleeping it off in the sun-kissed grass (ambulances used to arrive occassionally and pick up those who had died), so every area I didn't see dead bodies in seemed all right to me.

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